Category: Social & Political Issues

If you ask the questions a certain way, you can use the answer to prove what you want to prove.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Over the past few weeks, the news media have been full of reports of surveys from The New York Times, CBS News and Quinnipiac University which reveal that President Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows, especially among whites.  The Times and CBS polls both report that Obama ended his first year in office with the lowest approval rating of any president among whites in the years that these surveys have asked the question.

Let’s not question the results of these surveys, but rather look at how they were constructed and what they don’t tell us.  The survey questions ask specifically about how Obama has handled key issues, e.g., health care, the economy and terrorism (on which the president gets his top scores).  But the survey does not ask why people don’t approve of the job President Obama is doing in any given area.  How many don’t like Obama because his economic stimulus plan represents government intervention and how many don’t like it because he didn’t invest enough in job-producing activities? 

This approach allows the mainstream news media to continue tacking right in setting the agenda for discourse, helped by Quinnipiac’s spokesperson who asserts that the main reason for Obama’s low ratings is that he has lost the support of the moderate white male, moderate in this case meaning right of the decidedly centrist president.  Yet the survey offers no proof of this assertion, because the survey does not go deep enough into the reason people oppose the president. 

Take for example Charles Blow’s article titled Lady Blahblah on the January 16 Op/Ed page of the New York Times, which discusses the surveys in connection with Sarah Palin taking a commentator’s job at Fox News.  Blow assumes that many if not most of the white disapproving of Obama are waiting to watch Palin on Fox. 

I think in this case, Blow blew it. 

I live in a city that’s more than 70% Democratic in a blue state and most of the white people I know are disappointed with Obama, but for these reasons:

  • He has not pulled enough troops out of Iraq.
  • He is sending more troops to Afghanistan.
  • Guantanamo prison is still open.
  • He is not doing enough to help victims of the recession and create new jobs.
  • He has not aggressively pursued more regulation of the real estate and banking industries.
  • He has not more aggressively pursued health care reform.

None of these people are going to listen to Palin.  But none of these surveys distinguish this group from whites to the right of Obama.

Understand that I am arguing by anecdote, but I do it not to prove that the disaffected are left of President Obama, but to suggest that no one has yet proved that the disaffected are right of the president and ripe for picking by the Tea and Republican parties.  The media and most public forums just make this assumption in their analysis of the polls and for one reason: to keep moving the terms of discourse rightward.

There’s far too much conflating of the fictional with the real in nonfiction prose these days.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

I keep running across examples of nonfiction writers using fiction as examples or proofs of trends in the real world.  Now there are some occasions when a discussion of aspects of one or more pieces of fiction or works of art can illuminate a real-world trend.  For example, what people are wearing and eating in paintings can reveal a lot about the worlds in which the painters lived.  And there can be no doubt that the themes of novels (at least those not about writers) often reflect the social and economic trends of the moment in which they are written.

What I’m talking about is quite different, however, and involves passing off the fiction as a piece of fact that vitiates the need for supplying real ones.  I talked about one example a few months back in a blog entry on one writer’s attempt to compare the Polanski arrest to a fictional film to blame the 60s for licentiousness in society.

Here are the two recent examples I have run across of this rhetorical device of saying fictions are facts:

First from the feature story on the fact that women are approaching more than 50% of the U.S. workforce titled “Female Power” in the January 2nd-8th issue of The Economist: “A generation ago working women performed menial jobs and were routinely subjected to casual sexism—as “Mad Men,” a television drama about advertising executives in the early 1960s, demonstrates brilliantly.”

Let’s not argue over if it’s true or not that women performed menial jobs and encountered sexism in the early 60s.  It’s true.  But “Mad Men” does not “demonstrate” the sexism, rather it does what art is supposed to do, reflect it and exaggerate it. 

To use fiction to demonstrate sexism and glass ceilings existed in the early 1960s, you would have to give the example of many fictions, all of that age although not necessarily just about that age.  In the case of the role of women in the workforce, you might start with movies from 1955-1965 starring Jack Lemmon.  Better yet would be to point to surveys and studies or accumulate newspaper articles from that time. 

My second example is on page 64 of James McManus’ Cowboys Full.  I won’t bore you with the entire paragraph.  It’s an assertion that there was a lot of money floating around riverboats in the pre-Civil War South that card sharpies were only too happy to take in card games, typically from ultra-wealthy plantation owners.  McManus is probably right, but his sole proof are two fictional characters from a novel about the “Old South” written decades later in the industrialized society of the 1920s.  The novel is Gone with the Wind and the characters are Rhett Butler and Scarlet O’Hara’s father.

McManus makes exactly the same mistake as The Economist does, for not only are his examples fictional only, but they are fictions created in a later age, and without doubt reflecting that later age’s attitudes more than they reflect the age under discussion.

I don’t think those who use this false rhetorical device are trying to be devious.  Rather, they are merely thinking and writing in a sloppy fashion.

UPDATE: A January 19 National Public Radio story on women in the workforce stated (correctly, I think) that women wanting to join the workforce in the 60s and early 70s faced resistance from many men. But instead of quoting a survey or study, or even providing a number of mass culture manifestations of this attitude, the reporter instead gives a 10-second snippet of dialogue from the situation comedy, “All in the Family.” At least the reporter selected something from the age under discussion, but what she selected was a satire of the very attitudes she said were prevalent, which begs the question: does a satire in mainstream programming demonstrate that the attitudes existed or that the attitudes were dying? Only an accumulation of detail (which occurs in a good study) could answer the question.

 

The likely healthcare bill reminds me of Al Gore in 2000. If it fails, we’ll regret the alternative for decades.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

One of the big discussions among liberals and lefties these days is whether or not to support the likely health care bill that will result from merging the House and Senate versions of health care reform.  In the most recent New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg lists some of the prominent lefties who have already come out against the likely bill.  I didn’t check his list of those advocating defeat of the likely bill, but it sounds right.  It includes Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, Keith Olbermann and MoveOn.org.  Hertzberg goes on to tells why he thinks we should all support the likely bill. 

I agree that we should support the bill, flawed though it is in the number of additional people it will cover, the nature of standard coverage moving forward and how we as a society will pay for it. 

The flaws of the likely bill, however, are kind of like Al Gore’s were in his race against Bush the Second in 2000.  The difference between this bill and no bill at all are enormous, as were the real differences between Gore and Bush.

But the din of the debate on side issues, such as if the government has the right to promote a given religion by not including a safe and legal medical procedure in its coverage, makes it easy to forget what it will mean if no bill passes.  Just as in 2000, when the din of issues blurring the differences included Gore’s role in the creation of the Internet and Bush’ supposedly greater “likeability” (which turned out to be as much hokum as Bud Light’s “drinkability”!).

And as with the failure of Gore to win, if this health care bill fails, I guarantee that the majority of Americans will regret it for years to come.

I think to a large degree, too much is being made of leftist opposition to the likely bill.  I like, respect and often agree with all of the people who made Hertzberg’s list, which is why I’m wondering hopefully if perhaps one or more of the lions of the left are currently stating opposition to the likely bill for tactical reasons—to make certain that the final bill is as much to their liking as possible, to remind the Democratic leadership of its large left-of-center constituency.

Is it now in our national character to put a bandage on a foot when a hand is bleeding?

Posted on by Marc Jampole

The way that the National Basketball Association and some NBA teams have reacted to the Gilbert Arenas controversy has me more convinced than ever that one characteristic of our age (and here again, we are similar to the court of Phillip II of Spain) is to attempt to solve a problem by ignoring it and instead working on a completely different issue, claiming that the other issue is what matters. 

In our pursuit of terrorists, this bizarre strategy of ignoring the real problem and doing something else involved attacking Iraq when Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan and then attacking Afghanistan after the terrorists had moved to Pakistan.

In alternative energy, this strategy resulted in the Bush Administration providing massive support to a biofuels technology proven to consume more energy than it produces—processing corn into electricity.  Not only was money taken from more promising technologies, but the new demand for corn sent the price of food soaring.

And let’s not forget  that some on the right have blamed the lending policies of the federal government and not the bad loans unethically made and securitized by mortgage lenders as the cause of the real estate bubble whose bursting exploded into the worst recession since the one we call a depression.

In all of these cases, we in effect put a bandage on a foot when a hand was bleeding!

The same type of thinking has prevailed in the Arenas situation, which began when reports spread that the basketball player had pulled a gun on a teammate in the locker room in an argument about a gambling debt.  A few days after the world responded with shock and disgust, a photo captured Arenas playfully aiming at his teammates with his pointer fingers extended from his fists.

Let me first state that I think that Arenas and anyone else who pulled a gun in the incident at the heart of the controversy should be suspended from the NBA for 82 games, with a second offense drawing a lifetime ban.  The NBA rightfully bans guns from its locker rooms and practice facilities and should continue to do so.

But who really cares if Arenas was making fun of what he did with his teammates a few days later?  If someone had been hurt, the jocular attitude would certainly be in extremely poor taste, but since no one was hurt, just let the guy be a doofus.  Yet NBA Commissioner David Stern’s twisted reasoning made him ban Arenas for the silly joking around and not the dangerous incident.

The really twisted thinking though comes from the Capitals, Nets and other teams now banning card games in flight and in the locker room.  What if the players had argued over the last piece of cake?  Would you outlaw food in the locker room?  Locker room card games go back a long way, to the very origins of major league baseball, and are quite popular among players.  Why punish the many players who enjoy a friendly game because of one or two trigger-happy bozos?  It’s like punishing the Iraqi people with destruction of their economic and social infrastructure followed by years of war because some vicious terrorists are hiding in the hills of Afghanistan. 

Instead of making banks and businesses act ethically, Roger Lowenstein tells consumers that they don’t have to.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

In “The Way We Live” column of this week’s New York Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein notes that about 10.7 million families owe more on their houses than the homes are currently worth.  He advises those people to do what any smart bank or business would do, which is to walk away from the loan and the house. 

The article is really quite canny in how it demonstrates that the amorality of business should rule the actions of the individual. He tries to dispose of the ethical constraints that prevent people from walking away from a bad debt, e.g., it debases the character of the borrower and it depresses the prices of the other houses in the neighborhood, by questioning why homeowners should have these feelings in the real world of commerce.   He gives many examples of businesses walking away from commitments through default and bankruptcy.  He also gives the example of a baseball team not signing a new contract with a big star as an example of why loyalty should not be considered a virtue in the world of business (although in this case, there is no contract!).

Of course, Lowenstein forgets that many loans are worth more than the asset that served as the reason for borrowing the money.  Every time a business or an individual buys a car, airplane, copy machine, computer or any other type of equipment, the value of the item declines immediately and precipitously, and to typically far below the funds borrowed. 

But instead of comparing a home to these loans, Lowenstein wants to turn the average homeowner into a sophisticated multinational corporation that makes all decisions based solely on improving the bottom line.

Roger, I have an idea:  Instead of asking homeowners to act more like amoral businesses, why don’t you instead call for new regulations that would bring some ethics into business actions? 

Roger would not even think of this approach because behind his article is the ideological message that underpins much writing about both economics and personal business: the idea that regulation of business is always wrong and that the marketplace will solve all our problems if we just get government and society out of the way.  Laissez faire means do what you want, and by giving homeowners permission to do what they want, he keeps that option open for the banks securitized and sold bad loans, big companies that walk away from communities to lower their cost structure or hedge fund managers who open new funds “rather than try to earn back their investors’ lost capital” (from the actual article).

But I wonder, if we all play by the rules of the big, do the small have any chance at all?

Calling a thing by a name that it’s not to make the name sound better.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

On the front page of the business section in today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt builds his column around a propaganda technique that is really a baroque twist to an old-fashioned rhetorical device.  That is, unless you think Leonhardt really doesn’t know the meaning of a simple word we all use.

Leonhardt wants to show that rationing of medical care can be a good thing, but the example around which his article is built, Richmond, Virginia, is not about rationing, even though he says it is.  What Richmond, Virginia did was to cut the supply of hospital beds.  Leonhardt is either a) obtuse or b) manipulative (I select “b”) in calling the decline in beds an example of rationing, when in fact there has been no limiting of access to hospital beds in Richmond.

Here’s exactly what David the Lionhearted says:

“Since 1996, the Richmond area has lost more than 600 of its hospital beds, mostly because of state regulations on capacity. Several hospitals have closed, and others have shrunk. In 1996, the region had 4.8 hospital beds for every 1,000 residents. Today, it has about three. Hospital care has been, in a word, rationed.”

Later Leonhardt demonstrates that care has not suffered in Richmond.

Now here are the definitions of “to ration” that my favorite online resource, Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary, gives:

“1 : to supply with rations : put on rations  2 a : to distribute as rations : allot in rations  b : to distribute or divide (as commodities in short supply) in an equitable manner or so as to achieve a particular object (as maximum production of particular items) — compare DIRECT CONTROL c : to use or indulge in sparingly synonym see APPORTION”

There’s nothing in there about cutting supply, only about cutting access.  Richmond had an oversupply, which it reduced, with no impact on the health care of its residents.  We have a lot to learn from the positive steps Richmond took to reduce oversupply, but it teaches us nothing at all about rationing.

My guess is that David Leonhardt believes that one day we may have to resort to real rationing, which means limiting access to health care.  So he tries to sneak one by us by labeling something as rationing that everyone will think is a great thing but unfortunately is not rationing.

The old rhetorical trick is to call a negative thing by a positive name to make the thing sound better.  The baroque twist that David the Lionhearted makes is to call a positive thing by a negative name to make the name you call it sound better. 

How the news media helped to spread the lies of this passing decade.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Yesterday I characterized the last decade as “The Lying Zeroes” because so much of the activity of government, business, other institutions and individuals either created lies or was based on lies.

The news media turned out to be a primary vehicle for spreading lies, and in stating this I am including the Internet, all websites, blogs and chat rooms, as part of the news media.  In fact, the most obvious reason for the rapid spreading of lies during “The Lying Zeroes” is the enormous growth of Internet news media, with its currently very low entry fee for becoming a carrier of information to the public.  Websites, chat rooms, blogs, social networking pages and now tweets are ways to spread lies.

But the news media’s contributions to “The Lying Zeroes” go beyond technology.  Here are some other woeful media trends that helped to create or communicate lies:

  • The consolidation of media so that the ownership of mass media outlets is in fewer hands, leading to fewer editorial voices, especially on talk radio, now dominated by right-wingers who lie (not all right-wingers do) and who over the past 10 years have replaced a far wider set of opinions voiced by local radio personalities.
  • Getting too cozy with government sources, which led to Judith Miller’s false reports in The New York Times about weapons of mass destruction and the misleading reporting from the Iraqi war front.
  • Not fact-checking government sources, which allowed Dick Cheney and others to keep spreading false reports of Iraqi involvement with Al Qaeda.
  • The “Matt Drudge” technique, which involves quoting another news source on assertions that turn out to be false so that you can tell the story you want to tell without first actually checking facts.
  • The use of balanced reporting to conflate the factual statements of one group with the unfactual statements of other groups, as in the recent healthcare debate or most public issues involving science.
  • The shrinking of mass media.  With fewer reporters out there, more are relying on government statements, the reports of others and news releases for their information.
  • Continued lower standards related to the truth content in commercials, not just by politicians but by a huge range of charlatans offering hair growth, greater virility, a way out of pressing debt problems, magic cures and unbelievable investments.

There is nothing we can or should do about the proliferation of media, and therefore lying, on the Internet, except to maybe establish more organizations to serve as Internet “truth sheriffs.”  But the established mass media really should clean up its act by raising the standards of its reporting and demanding that its advertisers tell the truth.

Let’s name the passing decade after something a lot of people did well: lie about stuff.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

A lot of the punditerazzi in print, broadcast and online news media have been trying to brand the decade that is about to close with something akin to the “Swinging Sixties,” “The Me Decade,” “The Roaring Twenties” or “The Gay Nineties.”

So far, the most accurate name has come from Paul Krugman in his column in yesterday’s New York Times.  He calls the “Aughts” the “Decade of Zero”, as in zero growth in the stock market, in real estate prices, in the salary of the average worker and in the number of weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq.   

Krugman has a great point, and the fact that zero also refers to the number in the decade place of the years creates a very clever pun.

But I’m going to propose another moniker for the first 10 years of the 21st century: “The Decade of the Big Lie” or perhaps, “The Lying Decade.”  (“The Lying Aughties” doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m open.) 

What characterizes our decade more than the lies that elected officials, business leaders and other prominent people told us or that we as a society told each other? 

Here is an off-the-cuff partial list of the many lies upon which our lives rested and in some cases depended in “The Lying Decade.”  First, some very big lies our government told us:

  • There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
  • Iraq supported Al Qaeda
  • Everything is under control in New Orleans (just after Katrina hit)
  • We can achieve a victory in Iraq
  • We can achieve a victory in Afghanistan.

Here are some lies that individuals and organizations told us that lodged themselves into the belief systems of many people:

  • Waterboarding is not torture
  • John Kerry was not a hero in Viet Nam (“the “Swift Boat” lie)
  • Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forced bankers to make bad loans
  • It’s Obama’s recession
  • Global warming does not exist
  • The “Tea Party” drew a million people to its Washington march
  • Obama was not born in the U.S.A.

Let’s not forget frauds, which are collections of lies, including the 2000 voter fraud in Florida, Enron, Bernie Madoff and the other Ponzi schemers and the frauds of the pious politicians who turned out to be philanderers or engaged in the very behavior they were condemning.

Finally, here are some lies that it seemed most people believed and which motivated irrational actions by elected officials, businesses and individuals:

  • The private sector always gets the job done better than the public sector: which doesn’t take into account the private sector’s very bad and expensive performance in wartime, during the Katrina emergency and in administering private jails.
  • Technology companies have introduced a new era of endless gains in the stock market: which of course lead to the dot.com bust.
  • Real estate values will keep going up so you can buy a house and flip it or keep taking out bigger loans so you can live higher on the hog: we know how this one turned out.
  • Taxes are always a bad thing and we pay too many taxes in the United States: but our “to much” is lower than any other industrialized country and unfortunately not enough to pay for better schools, fixed highways, better and more mass transit, research into alternative technologies and other basic technologies and a guarantee of the basic rights that all people deserve in a wealthy society such as basic health care.

The sad thing is that so many institutions and individuals acted on these lies and by acting created our sad situation: fighting two unwinnable wars, a crumbling infrastructure, enormous unemployment and underemployment, a quarter of all homeowners owing more than the value of their homes.

The more I think about, the more I’m convinced that we are living in the great age of the big lie, but I really do like Krugman’s idea.  I know, let’s merge the two and call this dying decade “The Lying Zeroes,” which has the benefit of also referring to a number of our leaders during the period.

Mike & Mike replacements take a cheap shot at Michael Vick for ratings and Yahoo! follows along like a–dare I say it–lapdog.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

Twice this morning on ESPN radio, I heard Erik Kuselias and Mark Schlereth, today’s vacation replacements for Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic, try to foment anger against Michael Vick for receiving this year’s Ed Block Courage Award from the Philadelphia Eagles, on a unanimous vote by his teammates I understand.  Kuselias and Schlereth couldn’t understand how someone who had murdered dogs or made them fight could be given an award for courage.  They averred that it sullied the awards of the other recipients, as each NFL team votes for a winner every year.  They were livid that about one third of the listeners had emailed in supported Vick.

Instead of seeing the baiting of Vick by these disk jockeys for what it was, an attempt to boost website chatroom traffic and thereby increase ad revenues, Yahoo! decided to follow ESPN into the gutter.  By early this afternoon EST, the lead story on Yahoo!’s home page was an Op/Ed by someone named Chris Chase who said that the Eagles sullied the award by giving to someone who served time for an act of extreme cowardice.  

The crimes that Vick committed makes for an interesting discussion, because it’s an example of a cultural more becoming an enforced law.  As came out in the coverage of Vick’s trial, there has been a long-standing tradition of fighting dogs in certain southern enclaves.  We know that Vietnamese eat dogs, which proved to be a problem throughout the 70’s in San Francisco.  I remember the local media almost weekly wrote about dogs getting free of leashes in Golden Gate Park and never returning.  I’m condoning neither the fighting nor the eating of dog; in fact I find both disgusting.  I’m just pointing out that there are cultural differences and in this one case, our legal system does not accommodate the differences.

But whatever the nature of the crime, how can anyone deny that it takes courage for someone who has been a pampered and coddled star since at least the age of 12 to go through two years of hard jail time.  Jails are not very nice places, not even limited security jails.  Those “country club” prisons of movie mythology—they don’t really exist.

In short, Erik, Mark, Chris and any other pious busybody who still has a grudge against Vick for his brutal treatment of dogs:

 He did the crime AND he did the time.

In this country, that means that he’s free to go on with his life.  Instead of tacking cheap shots about giving an award for courage to a reformed criminal who has put his life back together, why don’t you do your job and talk about sports?

Buy now, pay later turns infantilization into debt slavery.

Posted on by Marc Jampole

After signing off yesterday, I realized that I forgot to mention one of the most subtle forms of infantilization of American adults, one that has led to the current deep recession (which I won’t believe is over until there is some job growth).

It’s the “buy now, pay later” mentality that makes people use high-interest credit cards or take loans on their houses to buy something now instead of saving up the money and not having to pay interest later.  Let’s amend the phrase and call it what it really is: “buy now and pay more later” because of what are sometimes exorbitant interest charges.

Infants and children can’t wait.  One of the signs of adulthood is being able to delay gratification.  Buy now, pay more later is about instant gratification.  It’s about behaving just like a child.

Yet the “buy now and pay more later” ideology permeates our culture more than any other ideological principle, more than even the superiority of the free market or the blessedness of monogamy.  And it has all happened since the end of World War II.

Most advertising is about making people want something right now so people will buy right now!!  If people stopped behaving like children when it comes to satisfying urges, many of which television and other mass media artificially inseminate into viewers, the U.S. economy would come unhinged.

On the other hand, when sub-prime mortgages brought down housing values, literally millions of people who had solid jobs and good mortgages suddenly owed more money than their houses were worth, all because as the value of housing had become inflated, they had borrowed more on theirs so they could buy now and pay more later.

So indeed, the U.S. would be better off if we weaned ourselves off the “buy on credit” mentality completely, except when it comes to buying (not fixing up) homes and paying for college for kids who deserve to be in college.  The economy would shudder if we all woke up one morning and decided to become adults, and then it would adjust.